Musée d'Orsay and Orangerie announce ambitious season spanning Mary Cassatt, Monet and the Statue of Liberty

Claude Monet, The Water Lily Pond, Green Harmony, 1899. Oil on canvas, 89.5 x 92.5 cm. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, Bequest of Count Isaac de Camondo, 1911 © Musée d’Orsay, dist. GrandPalaisRmn. Claude Monet, The Japanese Bridge, between 1918 and 1919. Oil on canvas, 74 x 92 cm. Paris, Musée Marmottan Monet. Photo © Musée Marmottan Monet / Christian Baraja SLB.

PARIS.— The Musée d’Orsay and Musée de l’Orangerie have unveiled an exhibition program for autumn 2026 through summer 2027 that moves between major historical reassessments, contemporary interventions and new experiments in virtual reality and museum outreach.

The season’s leading projects include France’s first major national-museum exhibition devoted to Mary Cassatt, an exploration of Auguste Bartholdi’s creation of the Statue of Liberty, a centenary program around Claude Monet and the Water Lilies, and a new installation by American artist Jenny Holzer.

Together, the exhibitions reveal an institution seeking to reconsider familiar figures through current questions of independence, political symbolism, family structures and historical memory. The museums are also expanding how visitors encounter their collections, with two virtual-reality experiences and a mobile museum carrying original works into communities across France.

From Bartholdi’s workshop to New York Harbor

The autumn season at the Musée d’Orsay begins with “Auguste Bartholdi: Liberty Enlightening the World,” on view from September 15, 2026, through January 31, 2027.

Organized with the Musée Bartholdi in Colmar, the exhibition traces the Alsatian sculptor’s path toward the realization of the Statue of Liberty, conceived as a gift from the French people to the United States. Initially intended to commemorate the centenary of American independence in 1876, the monument was not inaugurated in New York until October 28, 1886.

The exhibition examines not only Bartholdi’s artistic decisions but also the extraordinary campaign required to finance, promote and construct what was then the largest statue in the world. Its completion depended on a transatlantic publicity effort, public fundraising, the display of full-scale sections at international exhibitions and the combined expertise of sculptors, metalworkers and engineers, including Gustave Eiffel.

A parallel virtual-reality project, “A Statue for Liberty: Bartholdi’s Dream, from Paris to New York,” will occupy nearly 700 square meters of the museum’s Galerie Amont. Visitors will enter a reconstruction of the now-lost Gaget, Gauthier & Co. workshop, where almost 600 workers, artisans and craftsmen shaped the monument’s copper skin.

The experience follows the statue from early drawings and models to its assembly above the rooftops of Paris, its dismantling into more than 200 shipping crates and the campaign led by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer to finance its pedestal in New York.

Mary Cassatt reconsidered through independence

The season’s most significant retrospective is likely to be “Mary Cassatt: The Independent,” opening October 6 and continuing through January 31, 2027.

Organized with London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the exhibition marks the centenary of Cassatt’s death in 1926. According to the museum, France’s national institutions have never previously staged a major exhibition devoted to the American artist, despite her central position within the Impressionist movement and the six decades she spent living in France.

Bringing together nearly 80 paintings, pastels and prints, the exhibition uses independence as the central lens through which to reconsider Cassatt’s life and work. Rarely shown pieces from European private and public collections will be presented alongside American works that seldom travel outside the United States.

The exhibition will move beyond Cassatt’s familiar reputation as a painter of mothers and children. It will examine how she established herself as a professional in a male-dominated art world, maintained her own studio, employed paid models and represented women participating in modern social life.

Cassatt’s influence as an adviser to American collectors will also receive attention. Through her recommendations, she played a decisive role in bringing Impressionist paintings into major collections in the United States.

Another section will reconstruct her monumental, now-lost mural Modern Woman, created for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A digital restoration will evoke the scale of the original decoration, which measured approximately four by 18 meters.

The final galleries will address Cassatt’s support for women’s suffrage, including the benefit exhibition she organized with Louisine Havemeyer in New York in 1915. Following Paris, the show will travel to the National Portrait Gallery from March 11 to June 13, 2027, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from July 17 to November 28.

Jenny Holzer brings 19th-century voices to the façade

The contemporary program will be led by Jenny Holzer’s “J’ai vu,” opening October 20, 2026.

Holzer has drawn upon artists’ letters preserved in the museum’s archives, along with literary and political writings from the period represented in the Orsay collections. She will translate these sources into an installation of illuminated language, engraved stone and reflective paintings.

From October 18 through 22, texts by figures including Gustave Flaubert, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Émile Zola will be projected across the museum’s Seine-facing façade each evening from 7 to 11 p.m.

Inside, a site-specific LED installation will send streams of words through the former railway station. Newly created stone benches, many engraved with texts from between 1848 and 1914, will appear throughout the ground-floor galleries. Holzer’s intervention is intended to collapse the distance between historical testimony and contemporary political experience.

Families, private interiors and the theater of Vuillard

The Musée d’Orsay’s spring program turns toward domestic and social life.

“Family Stories,” scheduled for March 16 through July 18, 2027, will examine changing definitions of family in France between 1848 and 1914. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, drawings and archival materials will bring together artists and cultural figures ranging from Edgar Degas, Pierre Bonnard and Rosa Bonheur to Victor Hugo, Nadar, Alice Guy and Camille Claudel.

The exhibition will address motherhood, paternal authority, inheritance, sibling relationships and unconventional partnerships. Rather than presenting the family as a stable institution, it will examine it as a site of affection, rivalry, domination, loss and emancipation.

Opening one week later, “Vuillard: Intimate Theaters” will be the first exhibition in France devoted to Édouard Vuillard in nearly 25 years. Organized with the Phillips Collection in Washington, the show will examine the artist’s sustained fascination with theater from the 1890s through the late 1930s.

Vuillard moved easily between cabarets, symbolist theaters and more conventional Parisian stages. He designed programs and sets, painted actors and writers and structured his intimate interiors with the sensitivity of a stage designer. The exhibition will connect these domestic scenes to the theatrical culture that shaped his approach to space, gesture and atmosphere.

Monet and the centenary of the Water Lilies

At the Musée de l’Orangerie, Monet will provide the central thread linking the autumn and spring seasons.

“Monet: Painting Time,” running from September 30, 2026, through January 25, 2027, will consider the artist’s attempts to represent duration, changing light and the passage of time. It will be accompanied by “Claude Monet Along the Water,” a 20-minute virtual-reality experience following the artist from the Seine to the pond at Giverny and finally to the panoramic Water Lilies galleries.

A contemporary counterpoint will bring together works made between 1971 and 2000 by Vija Celmins. Her painstaking images of oceans, deserts, snowfields and night skies will be placed in dialogue with Monet’s apparently limitless aquatic surfaces.

The centenary program will culminate in “1927: Time Regained,” opening March 31, 2027, exactly 100 years after the installation of Monet’s Water Lilies transformed the Orangerie.

Co-organized with the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition will assemble works created in 1927 across painting, photography, film, architecture and design. Rather than portraying the year through a single artistic movement, it will present a period shaped simultaneously by modernism, Art Deco, jazz, technological fascination, social conflict and colonial power.

Films including Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Abel Gance’s Napoléon and Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer will provide reference points for examining mechanization, expanded cinematic vision and racial stereotypes. The exhibition will place the peaceful environment envisioned for Monet’s final paintings against the political and cultural tensions of the interwar period.

Taking original works beyond Paris

The program also extends far beyond the museums’ walls.

Beginning October 12, 2026, the MuM’Orsay, described as the first museum truck dedicated to the Orsay collections, will carry approximately 20 original paintings, sculptures, photographs and decorative-arts objects to rural areas, smaller towns and underserved neighborhoods.

Its inaugural display will explore celebration and festivity. During its first 40-week journey, the mobile museum will travel through Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Brittany, supported by educational programs and creative workshops.

Internationally, the Orsay will present “What a Wonderful World: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum from November 14, 2026, through March 28, 2027. The exhibition will examine how artists responded to industrialization, rail travel, the transformation of Paris, new forms of leisure and the changing rhythms of modern life.

The program demonstrates how the two Paris museums are balancing scholarship with broader public access. Historical exhibitions remain at its core, but immersive technology, contemporary art and mobile displays increasingly determine how those histories are experienced and retold.

The museums note that announced titles and dates remain subject to modification.